During the UAR-era, Jadid was stationed in
Cairo, Egypt. Jadid established the Military Committee alongside other Ba'athists in 1959. The chief aim of the Military Committee was to protect the UAR's existence. In the beginning there was only four members of the Military Committee, the others were
Hafez al-Assad,
Abd al-Karim al-Jundi
and Muhammad Umran.[5]
The Military Committee also tried to save the Syrian Ba'ath movement from annihilation. Committee members were among those who blamed Aflaq for the Ba'ath Party's failing during the UAR years.[6]
The party's Third National Congress in 1959 supported Aflaq's decision to dissolve the party, but a 1960 National Congress, in which Jadid was a delegate representing the then-unknown Military Committee, reversed the decision and called for the Ba'ath Party's reestablishment. The Congress also decided to improve relations with Nasser by democratising the UAR from within. A faction within the party, led by al-Hawrani, called for Syria's secession.[7]
The Military Committee did not succeed in its aims, and in September 1961 the UAR was dissolved. Nazim al-Qudsi, who led the first post-UAR government, persecuted Jadid and the others for their Nasserite loyalties, and all of them were forced to retire from the Syrian Army.[5]

While Jadid remained away from public view, as the second secretary of the Ba'ath Party, men allied to him filled the top posts in state and army:
Nureddin al-Atassi, as party chairman, state president and later prime minister; Yousuf Zouayyen, as prime minister;
Brahim Makhous
as foreign minister, Hafez al-Assad
as defense minister; Abd al-Karim al-Jundi, as security chief. Many of these men were Alawis (e.g. all of the above except Atassi, Jundi, and Zouayyen, who were
Sunni), giving the government a sectarian character. Several were military men, and all belonged on the Ba'ath Party's left wing.

Under Jadid's rule, Syria aligned itself with the
Soviet bloc
and pursued hardline policies towards Israel
and "reactionary" Arab states especially Saudi Arabia, calling for the mobilization of a "people's war" against Zionism
rather than inter-Arab military alliances. Domestically, Jadid attempted a socialist
transformation of Syrian society at a forced pace, creating unrest and economic difficulties. Opponents of the government were harshly suppressed, while the Ba'ath Party replaced parliament as law-making body and other parties were banned. Public support for his government, such as it was, declined sharply following Syria's defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, when
Israel
captured the Golan Heights, and as a result of the troubled internal conditions of the country.

After the war, in particular, tensions began to increase between Jadid's followers and those who argued that the situation called for a more moderate stance on socialism and international relations. This group coalesced around Defense Minister Hafez al-Assad, who protested the "adventurism" of Jadid, and demanded a normalization of the internal situation by adopting a permanent constitution, liberalizing the economy, and mending ties with non-Ba'athist groups, as well as the external situation, by seeking an alliance with conservative Arab states such as
Jordan
and Saudi Arabia. While Jadid retained the allegiance of most of the civilian Ba'ath apparatus, Assad as defense minister gradually asserted control over the military wing of the party. In 1969, Assad purged several Jadid loyalists, and from that point on Jadid had lost his preeminence in the state.

In 1970, when
conflict
erupted between the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) and the Jordanian army, Jadid sent Syrian-controlled
Palestinian
troops of the nominally PLO-run Palestine Liberation Army, based in Syria, into Jordan in order to help the PLO. This action was not supported by Assad's more pragmatic Ba'ath faction, and the troops withdrew. The action helped trigger the simmering conflict between Jadid's and Assad's wings of the Ba'ath Party and army. The Syrian communist party aligned itself with Salah Jadid. The Soviet ambassador,
Nuritdin Mukhitdinov
was drawn in the power struggle. Hafez al Assad was angered by the meddling in Syrian politics by the Soviet Union, so he decided to scare the Soviets by sending
Mustafa Tlass
to Beijing
to procure arms and wave Chairman Mao's
little Red Book.[8]
In November 1970, Jadid attempted to fire Assad and his supporter Mustafa Tlass, which in turn caused Assad to launch an intra-party coup against Jadid, dubbed the
Corrective Movement. Jadid was arrested on 13 November 1970, and remained in the
Mezzeh prison
in Damascus
until his death,[3]
while al-Assad would remain in power until his death in 2000. Jadid died of a heart attack in a hospital on 19 August 1993.[9]